Joe worked at ALCO right out of high school, from 1974 to 1984. Over the years of his employment Joe worked as an oiler, a tracer lathe operator, gear shaper, piston welder, and painter.

Joe worked at Alco right out of high school, from 1974 to 1984. He was told that if you want a good job, apply to Alco. He went down to apply but he kept getting told that there were no jobs available. He saw in the newspaper that Alco was sending employees to BOCES to take a blueprint reading(?) course. He went down and signed up for the same course for $15. When he finished the course, he went back to Alco and ran into Grover “ozzy” Ostrander who was the personnel director. Joe talked to him and learned his teacher from BOCES had already called Ostrander about Joe.  Ostrander invited him into his office; “I went in there and I sat down and my head was spinning and everything else and I thought, wow this is it, because Alco was one of the best jobs in the area. Best paying. And that was my big break in life. I mean that was it, right out of high school.” Joe says that Ostrander pulled out a stack of jobs and went through them and picked one out for Joe–an oiler maintenance job. Ostrander said it was a good starting job because you weren’t stuck in one place, you moved around the factory and could see how everything worked. 

Like Firth Carpet, Joe says that Alco was very self-sustaining and everything was made right there in the factory on Columbus and Orchard Streets. Pistons, rods, most of the components that were used were made right there. 

Over the years of his employment Joe worked as an oiler, a tracer lathe operator, gear shaper, piston welder, and painter. There was a bid system for jobs with 3-12 brackets. The company would post available jobs and employees would sign up to bid on a certain job. 

The Navy shop was in the blue building that still exists today and the piston shop where he worked was located in that building. This was a night shift, and Joe generally worked alone. As a piston welder he would heat up the aluminum turbine rings in an oven and freeze steel bushings in liquid nitrogen. He then used a press to drop the bushing into the ring. This was precision work, says Joe, it had to drop straight onto the ring. He did a similar process to weld rings onto the pistons, completing about 60 per night. 

When he was a piston welder he worked on the balcony above the Navy shop. “When I was up there working I was witness to one of the great disasters of Alco. I was there working one afternoon, it was a night job 3-11, and I noticed some commotion on the bridge over the outlet and on West Division Street, and I looked and I realized that there was a tractor trailer with one of our engines on it that went around the corner…and the truck tipped over with the engine on it….they had to get a crane to get it back up and they brought the engine right back because it had to be torn down and repaired.”

In 1979 Joe was laid off until early 1980 when he came back as a positioner, welding all the seams on the engine blocks in the sheet metal shop. His last job with Alco was painting the engines. Joe recalls engines for the Navy being primed with a special non corrosive primer using an electrostatic paint gun. He says each job and country had their own color. France used a reddish purple, Australia was blue-purple. 

Joe was laid off again and got a new job at New Process Gear. He retired from New Process in 2011. Alco called him back but when he went to the information meeting he learned that they were selling the engine business so he decided not to return.

“I loved Alco, I loved working there,” says Joe. He made many friends while at Alco and says it was a really good, well paying job. He is thankful that he was able to work there right out of high school and learn all the skills that he did so that he could have a career in the future.